10 Lamest Wrestling Authority Figures
Power Outage
In the halcyon days of the Monday Night Wars, Eric Bischoff and Vince McMahon's dominance over WCW Nitro and WWE Raw respectively were, for the most part, means to an end.
A renewed vigour greeted the corrupt boss trope after 'Easy E' revealed his affiliation with the New World Order in late-1996 and Vince McMahon screwed Bret Hart for real a year later. They were greedy, power-hungry snakes, designed to provide an additional wall for a babyface to climb en route to titles and glory at their expense. Being their own top heels took away some worry about a carefully curated star jumping ship, too.
Bischoff and McMahon knew the value of their comeuppance too. Stephanie McMahon's borderline-abusive behaviour on Monday Night Raw in the modern age is quite literally a WWE 'Universe' away from the sh*t-kickings the bosses would take for the good of the cause. Authority figures were personas to be used like any other, until they frustratingly became part of the furniture.
An obsession with business hierarchies and corporate structures emerged, regardless of the redundancy of the gimmick. Short-lived 2001 startup XWF commenced with Sable appearing first to announce herself as the 'CEO', then unveil Rowdy Roddy Piper as the 'Commissioner'. Their importance had somehow replaced those of the actual wrestlers, despite tangible evidence that the authority figure was no longer a bonafide draw.
There remains an apparent need for the time-filling exposition-mongers to this day, despite the constant undermining by other power-players elsewhere on the show.
10. WWE Raw General Manager Brad Maddox
Made to suffer for undertaking task after task as a corporate suck-up for higher authority figures that blatantly despised him, Brad Maddox was never more than a whipping boy and often much, much less.
Allegedly a favourite of Triple H's in real life, Maddox was a long-standing developmental prospect who had the misfortune of breaking through shortly before 'The Game's NXT vision became the fully formed Full Sail star factory. His debut as a corrupt official in the divisive CM Punk/Ryback Hell In A Cell 2012 main event only fed into sh*tkickings from 'The Big Guy', The Shield and Punk himself over the coming months, before a sideways step into a role as 'Managing Supervisor' Vickie Guerrero's assistant eventually saw him fail upwards into the GM role when the much-maligned (spotting a pattern?) Guerrero got the boot herself.
Routinely discredited by his immediate superiors, Maddox was dead in the water as a viable heel before his overdue sacking in May 2014 - long after Triple H and Stephanie's Authority had assumed proper control of Raw. He was thus rendered obsolete when forced into becoming an active competitor, amounting to less than nothing before his November 2015 release.