10 Times Wrestlers Pulled Back The Curtain
Magicians revealing their own tricks, or distracting you into falling for new ones?
There are no rules when it comes to establishing what does or doesn't still remain sacred in pro wrestling anymore.
We are generations and generations (and generations and generations) removed not just from those fans that think everything to be 100% real, but even for the fans that know it isn't but need to believe 100% of the time that it is.
As usual, the medium's a happy one somewhere in the middle. Yes, fundamentally wrestling is a fatally flawed game if the wrestlers don't accept certain ludicrous terms of their lives and turn up for work each week with them in mind, but that's not to say the modern shows call for a return to the days of the 1980s and 1990s and pitfalls that came with each of them.
Those exposed the industry in a very different way. These examples simply had fun with the form, or in the case of one documentary, charted the detailed and complex pitfalls of even wanting to perform all these tricks in the first place.
For once so long a barrier to their dark arts, the curtain has been beneficial to folk in more recent times....
10. Roman Reigns
In 2018, WWE thought they'd finally figured out the Roman Reigns problem once and for all, and deemed it worthwhile to try and use the perceived internal favouritism towards Brock Lesnar as a unique way of finally getting 'The Big Dog' over with the audience. All theoretically ideal with a WrestleMania showdown on the horizon between the two.
The play failed spectacularly.
Reigns accusing McMahon of anything remotely like bias was too ludicrous a line for even WWE's purest heart fans. The paying punters had witnessed Roman's rise for years, and had seen it survive the scorn of multiple rejections along the way. Only with the boss' stroke could something like that have occurred, no matter how intense the pair's Gorilla Position stand-off was supposed to be.
This undercooked angle contributed to the toxic atmosphere that greeted the match a few weeks later. People so flatly refused to believe that the former Shield man was some kind of exiled pariah that they booed the entire match out of the building of sheer spite.