10 Worst Payoffs To WWE Storylines
Unnecessary losses, lacklustre reveals, and a couple of failed invasion attempts...
Remember the Katie Vick storyline? The one where Triple H dressed up as Kane, pretended to have sex with an ex-girlfriend’s corpse inside a casket at her very own funeral, before signing off the whole twisted skit with the “I screwed your brains out” one-liner?
Course you do, because the bad ones tend to be difficult to forget.
And unfortunately, there’ve been a fair few bad ones over the years. Not only that, but the company has also had a pretty poor track record of saving the most disappointing parts of storylines for the big finales that ultimately mark the payoffs to those angles. How very generous of them indeed.
Over the years, we’ve seen payoffs that simply just don’t make sense, payoffs that render the entire angle a joke, and payoffs that fell victim to good old-fashioned backstage politicking. However they eventually ended up playing out, one thing that all the ones on this list have in common is that they’ve each, in their own way, been flat-out bad.
From headscratchers to face-palmers, here we take a rueful look back at some of the worst payoffs that the company’s ever presented us with, recounting where, why, and how badly they went wrong.
10. Kevin Nash Text Debacle
To cut an awfully long story short, in the summer of 2011, CM Punk was on fire.
So how did WWE choose to capitalise on that? By having Kevin Nash, of all people, show up at SummerSlam 2011 and screw Punk out of the WWE title.
Nash’s involvement was strange enough in itself, but the story’s oddity didn’t quite end there. Nash explained his attack on Punk by claiming Triple H had texted him and asked him to do so, before it was later revealed that Nash had gotten hold of Triple H’s phone and sent the message himself.
Basically, the brilliantly executed 'Summer of Punk' had degenerated into an angle where Triple H’s mate nicked his phone and stitched him up with a fake text message.
Yes, this is WWE, not the Jerry Springer Show…
You could argue the big text reveal wasn’t the absolute final payoff, but that would only lead us on to further questionable booking choices. Rather than letting Punk get some revenge on Nash, he was instead fed to Triple H before the boss himself faced Nash in a convoluted 'Sledgehammer on a Pole' match at TLC in December.