10 Wrestlers Who Had To Destroy Themselves To Get Over

The bloated WWE schedule has a way of reinforcing - super-serving! - a negative stigma.

Look at the reaction Sasha Banks received on this week's RAW. She did nothing but stay away from WWE for several months, during which time anticipation built and the old perception faded. She was no longer the overfamiliar performer who shared a needy relationship with Bayley. If anything, if she really wanted to symbolise the change in her attitude, she should have walked to the ring with Bayley sat on top of her head, and then shook her off. They were linked that closely.

The less facetious, WWE version was probably more effective. The cheap heat element was probably unnecessary, but it worked towards portraying Sasha as a ruthless, motivated wrestler who had embraced being a piece of sh*t once again. She radiated confidence and viciousness in her nasty beatdown of Becky Lynch. She was her old self again: her own boss.

There's a macro take in there somewhere, about cyclical rosters and off-seasons and such, but in summary, the formula is thus: WWE star minus WWE equals getting over.

To get over with wrestling's fickle, bloodthirsty fanbase, often, an act needs to disappear.

Or disintegrate, one of the two.

Old Bray Wyatt:

A real bruising in-ring act on his best day, and an eerie presence before he was sucked into the Such Good Sh*t Generator of exploding monitors and blood buckets and refrigerators.

Eventually, as his weight ballooned and he wore his own merch, Wyatt came to resemble one of his own fans. Of which there were few. This was fitting, since Wyatt seemed way too high on his own cryptic, self-indulgent words. Just a few short years after his debut, fans stopped decoding the promos because it became clear that they were the written equivalent of those faked fairy photographs: just fairly transparent exercises in bullsh*t.

New Bray Wyatt:

The most creative performer in all of American wrestling.

Literally became awesome by promising us that the awful "slob loser" of yore was dead. The stench was so bad that he had to reassure us by cutting off his own head. He is now a demented kids TV host by surreal day and a neck-snapping, disturbing bad dream manifest at night, where you can barely even make him out, because this new evolution of the character is powered by our terrified imagination as much as his own, deranged projection.