10 WWE Stars Who Were TRULY Buried
Journey to the centre of the earth.
Christ, is there a more irritating debate in the entire wrestling discourse than the word "buried"?
Appropriately enough, the take never ages well: it rots. Many thought WWE buried Dolph Ziggler by demoting him from the World Heavyweight Title picture in 2013. This caused hysteria, but the subsequent years have legitimised the decision: Ziggler was a firecracker of a worker, by the standards of a time surpassed now by orders of magnitude. Ultimately, he was an upper midcard-level talent whose fetish for bumping proved fatalistic. He got too good at doing jobs, to paraphrase a lesson imparted by Terry Funk, and he never showed enough on the mic to distinguish himself.
EC3 has received piss-poor treatment in 2019 - but you can't botch that disastrously, on Main Event, and escape blame. Several online fans bemoan the treatment of perennial title match loser Samoa Joe - but this protest isn't echoed in arenas. He isn't the same force was he in the 2000s - his performances are often sluggish - and WWE makes best use of his formidable promo game to promote inessential B-level pay-per-views. Terribly, but you get the idea.
This list is reserved for those WWE truly didn't value, whether through cruelty or ineptitude or both.
10. Harper
Harper is a victim of a chronically f*cked WWE system in which creative freedom is verboten.
Dave Meltzer reported that Harper was blamed for Braun Strowman's botch at the WrestleMania 35 André The Giant Memorial Battle Royal (!), and that Vince "hated" his (favourably received) Axxess match with Dominick Dijakovic. That is a weird tidbit: the f*ck is Vince doing watching Axxess matches, when he, in Triple H's words, doesn't even watch NXT? Moreover, Vince wasn't happy with Harper's post-'Mania dark match with EC3, either. He "hated" the Drake Maverick spots the agents came up with.
In TV masterpiece The Wire, Homicide Detective Jimmy McNulty is loathed by his boss Bill Rawls. McNulty claims that Rawls has "a hard-on" for him, in this context meaning a grudge he spends a disproportionate amount of time dedicated to upholding.
It seems this phenomena applies to the Vince/Harper relationship.
Where McNulty's maverick, not-by-the-book methods informed Rawls' hatred, Harper's inability to speak in a southern accent has informed Vince's. It's an oddly specific stance from which Vince will not be moved. Harper is of course a great pro wrestler, an agile colossus with offence that is legit jaw-dropping - Skinner, but great.
Vince pushed Skinner more than Harper as a singles player.