10 Wrestlers Who Defeated The WWE Machine
F*ck you, I won't do what you tell me.
Steve Austin famously called out Vince McMahon on the Network version of his Stone Cold podcast. How can anybody jump up and grab the brass ring, he reasoned, when all but the most respected veterans - a dying breed unto themselves - are afraid of even walking, given that the corridors of Titan Towers are strewn with egg shells?
Sasha Banks revealed last year that she is terrified of McMahon. And with good reason, history indicates: his vision for a "WWE Superstar" is an impossible ideal. You must not have worked anywhere else, even if you were signed to a lucrative deal because you became a ticket-selling attraction elsewhere. You must be tall and jacked, even if you can no longer artificially inflate your physique. You can't use your own initiative to grab that brass ring - but why aren't you grabbing the brass ring?
Several have walked, unable or unwilling to accept their lot, the most recent of which was Austin Aries. He felt creatively stifled, marginalised on 205 Live - and that's where he thought his watch would end. History indicates he was probably wise not to waste his time. Even the man who carried Vince's company through its lowest ebb, Bret Hart, was thrown to the wolves. He had served his purpose, and he was grumbling. The machine simply spat him out.
Not so these men...
10. Goldberg
Goldberg and WWE were a poor fit in 2003.
He was stupidly jacked and immensely popular, but as is so often the case, that popularity worked against him. He had the audacity to get over in a different promotion, for which he was belatedly recruited and resented. That logic is unfathomable. So too was his booking; Goldberg was exposed in merely good lengthy matches lacking entirely in the explosive intensity with which he made his name. It reeked of either intentional sabotage or miscomprehension. His subsequent feud with Triple H all but confirmed the former.
Not for the first time, the outcast - who not surprisingly was deeply irritated by his brief run - was welcomed back into the fold as a result of the company's inability to create new stars. Or an unwillingness. Either way, the result remained the same: Goldberg, in a deal in part brokered by video game company 2K, returned to WWE for a Brock Lesnar rematch at Survivor Series 2016.
Happenstance, as much as anything else, dictated a return to the Goldberg of old; he defeated Lesnar in a shocking squash because he wasn't capable of doing much else - though he had also waited long enough to ensure his negotiating hand was more powerful.