10 Wild Creative Pitches Wrestlers Made To Get Into WWE
Kenny Omega runs the ropes faster than anyone - and he was almost furious, too...
By now, provided you're a long-suffering fan of WWE - or even someone who really likes it, in spite of countless cases of promotional malpractice - you'll have endured the wild creative pitches that WWE has imposed on its talent.
Karrion Kross as the fourth (and worst) member of Demolition was something else, even by latter-day Vince McMahon standards. This is the cynical take, but it really felt like an indirect punishment to Triple H. They stripped Kross of every theatrical accompaniment with which he got over (or pushed) as a test or out of spite, decided he was too boring, and then said "Put a Gladiator mask on him or something". If Vince didn't want to look at Christian's face because he found it creepy, it was as if found Karrion's face too bland.
Keith Lee, a very articulate guy who played a just man very well - whose explosions mean so much more when his fair disposition is rattled by some heel pr*ck - was repackaged, dismally, as the 'Bearcat' in the same year of 2021 in a development far more problematic than is remembered.
This is the way it goes, or at least went: WWE was the biggest name in town, Vince knew all, and he wasn't about to let a wrestler have agency over their own career.
Certain intrepid developmental talents tried to work the system, however...
10. Santana Garrett Tries To Walk So That Nikki ASH Can Run
What happened, between 2001 and 2022, is that the creative writing staff cracked the actual description of their duties and pitched pure sh*t to Vince McMahon in order to spare themselves a rollicking.
Writers who admitted to being fans were laughed at, and considered marks. Writers who pitched wrestling-centric storylines evidently didn't get their stuff through. Collectively, they began to realise that it was easier to simply pitch dire, juvenile jokes and keep their mouths shut about the wrestlers they did like, because Vince treated a good faith recommendation as if it were a threat to his precious genius - a petulant "You think you know better than me?" fit that killed off many a promising career.
Eventually, the talent became aware of this cheat code and volunteered to do broad, wacky b*llocks just to get on TV. Nikki ASH played a kid's TV-level superhero, probably with a degree of earnestness, in fairness, but much funnier was Shane Thorne's enterprising, degrading bid to be, simply, "As Australian as I can possibly be". He was a Crocodile Dundee x Crocodile Hunter-styled fellow who lived in the presence of several deadly animals (in Australia; he wasn't conscripted to NXT UK).
Santana Garrett tried her luck along these lines too, telling Lucha Libre that she wanted to play the Wonder Woman-adjacent character she had worked under on the indies in WWE. If her infamous NXT match with Taynara Conti is any indication, she had in fact discovered a superpower, because it was worked in bullet time.
Garrett wasn't the only performer with a half-decent grasp of what the promotion actually was under Vince McMahon...