10 Wrestlers Who Stopped Trying (But WWE Pushed Anyway)
Showing no ass in half-assed performances.
Feel a bit guilty writing this.
For us schmucks working a normal office job, the act of commuting is just horrendous. It’s hard to get a seat on public transport in rush hour, and when you do find one, you have to climb over that tutting sh*thead who invariably hogs the aisle seat because they can’t bear the thought of sharing space with their fellow man. Sh*theads.
Commuting is awful. And it takes, on average, about 25 minutes. Pro wrestlers spend half of their lives in airports with the additional inconvenience of wrestling fans pestering them for photographs.
Nobody heckles us when we’re sat in our office chairs. We don’t encounter hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter mentions advising us to “f*ck off and die you f*g”. Some of us get that in the comments sections of our articles, but not on the same scale. Nobody obnoxiously screams “WHAT?” at us when we’re trying to do our jobs, unless you’re training somebody on the dense side. We don't bump. Not in the kitchen. Not anymore, thankfully.
So it’s a bit rich of us to write this, but then, we’re not rich.
The majority of us don’t get paid seven-figure lump sums to do a worse version of an already tedious match format…
10. Hulk Hogan - 1993
“Stopped trying,” in the case of the ’93 Bond Villain Hogan vintage, is actually understating things. The man actively buried the WWF, and its flagship title, on Japanese television. The WWF Title was a “trinket”, Hogan said, not like the coveted IWGP Heavyweight Championship.
And this guy burned the Observer on live TV?
He didn’t really covet that, either. Hogan was in full thespian mode by 1993, and if WrestleMania IX is any indication, he fancied himself for a Franklin Roosevelt biopic. At ‘Mania itself, Hogan watched his mate Brutus Beefcake suffer a pasting before making the big save—mirroring his nepotistic-tastic career—in a match in which he did deviate from his usual routine…with an eye-poke to IRS.
Infamously, he also put one in the eye of Bret Hart in the night’s main event. After Mr. Fuji threw salt in Bret Hart’s face, leading to Yokozuna’s WWF Title win, an upset Hogan stormed the ring. Burying the Hitman was his spot, brother. He didn’t much care for the spot as WWF Champion, and neglected to appear on the incipient RAW, at all, before dropping the trinket to Yoko at King Of The Ring.
At least Brock Lesnar threw the odd suplex and bounced up and down a bit.