10 Wrestlers Who Didn’t Respect The Business
These guys’ asses will be taken to wrestler’s court.
You’ve gotta respect the business.
You’ve got to extend your hand and shake it limply. That goes for every wrestler, every time. Sit your ass down and do what you’re told.
Why are you doing what you’re told?
That main event bracket ain’t gonna crack itself. Don’t you want it? Don’t you wanna be a star?
Oh, so you think you’re some kind of hot-shot? You think you’ve got it all figured out, huh?
Go change in the locker room. You ain’t a star until the fans say you’re a star. You ain’t even over yet. When they pay their hard-earned money to see you, then we can talk.
Oh, so you think you’re over because the fans chant your name. Those damn marks will chant for anybody. Don’t let it get to your head.
The political navigations of the pro wrestling circuit sound like a complete nightmare. A game with contradictory rules and no internal logic, a wrestler might piss off a veteran without quite knowing how they did it. A wrestler is an ass-kissing stooge if they’re too nice, or a greenhorn who don’t respect the business if they’re not nice enough.
You’ve gotta respect the business…whatever that means on any given day.
Who didn’t…?
10. Braun Strowman
Braun Strowman appears to be a reformed business respecter these days.
He’s still prone to fits of idiocy - and just because he has the face of a baby doesn’t mean he has to be so immature - having buried “flippy floppy” wrestlers in November 2022. In what was presumably a spot of punishment booking, he was teaming with Ricochet by December.
Oh, so you don’t like flippy guys, huh?
He was a lot worse during his first main event run. Having effectively bypassed NXT, perhaps he got too big for his britches. This would explain the various reports of Braun turning up late and leaving early, and the sensational story in which he bantered off a child he had no idea was the son of Kurt Angle. It was reported by Dave Meltzer that Strowman had to get on his hands and knees to ward off the fury of the child’s mother: Karen Jarrett.
Strowman, you asshole, you begged off in front of a damn wo-man? Did you cry?
Goddamnit son, that’s the wrong way ‘round. You’re meant to make the women cry, for some minor breach of etiquette, at the ass-crack of dawn in front of the entire locker room.
Crate of beer for the boys.
9. Ronda Rousey
Ronda Rousey wasn’t enamoured with the wrestling business.
She hated the fans, and really, what was their problem? Look, Ronda was dismal in that second run, but the first one kicked ass. Some lunatics were even complaining, in 2018, that she didn’t go through NXT first. What?
She carried Triple H to an actually good WrestleMania match in her in-ring debut. Half of his opponents couldn’t even do that.
And still, at Survivor Series, they turned on her (after a killer match against Charlotte Flair, bizarrely). “F*ck these fans, dude,” she said on Steve-O’s podcast a few years ago. Was she working?
It didn’t seem like it.
Rousey was not shy about registering her disgust with the fandom at the time, nor the business itself after she left it. Or at least, the version of the business Vince McMahon helmed.
And folks…
8. Mr. Kennedy
Mr. Kennedy wasn’t a particularly clever bloke, but he was sensible enough to grasp that, as somebody with a strong baritone and a modicum of heel presence, he had enough to get over in the least competitive era of talent in WWE history.
For a time, anyway. He pissed off one too many people by the end of his WWE run.
Kennedy hopped on over to TNA shortly after dumping Randy Orton on his neck, where he complained that WWE didn’t like him chewing gum.
Chew gum? Gum? I’ll chew your ass out, boy, get to wrestler’s court. You are accused of being reckless. How do you plead?
Guilty?
Did you deliberately injure that man?
Oh, so you said Not Guilty.
Take some responsibility and look after the boys, asshole!
Kennedy was reportedly brash and arrogant and didn’t think he had to hunker down and work for it.
He should have; he wasn’t particularly good.
7. Eva Marie
Eva Marie. What is she, an influencer?
The hell’s an influencer?
Maybe she can influence the rest of these bimbos not to wrestle no more. The business doesn’t need anybody that the fans can’t take seriously.
The business was just doing fine when a zombie mortician who drew his power from an inanimate object was working an ultimate fighting machine who hadn’t ever fought in real mixed martial arts in dressed-up high school gyms in 1995.
It was doing just fine, boy.
Eva Marie didn’t respect the business because she showed less than zero interest in becoming anything approaching halfway acceptable at her craft. Everything she did looked weak, limp, abysmal. She wasn’t fast or strong or technical or anything. She wrestled as if she didn’t want to mess up her appearance.
She knew that she didn’t have to put the graft in because the awful company she worked for was never going to take her seriously, and she made a decent wedge of money for it.
And that’s the way to do it. Good for her.
6. Kevin Nash
Kevin Nash held such contempt for pro wrestling, at his self-indulgent worst, that he made his apathy his gimmick. As much as he contributed to the 1990s boom, it always seemed as if thought himself too “cool” for it.
If an outright disrespect for the business is too severe a take on it, he certainly disrespected “the boys”. He infamously referred to the WCW cruiserweight division as “vanilla midgets” while having the gall to barely move in his matches.
Given the book in early 1999, for some ungodly reason, Nash was partly responsible for WCW’s wider, systemic decline. As a farewell of sorts, he booked himself to perform commentary duties on Thunder. Look, it was really funny, but also really quite pathetic. His smirking above-it-all performance was him saying that he never fancied WCW, anyway. He kicked WCW while it was down - and he knocked it on its ass!
Nash willingly participated in the ruination of the business to either make money by doing criminally little or, simply, to entertain himself and his mates.
That Nash. Plays with his hair more than a damn schoolgirl. I respect what you did to the Dubya See Dubya, so you get a pass this time.
5. Miro
In AEW, Miro was incredible as the Redeemer - which was stupidly impressive, since standing out in 2021 AEW was such a challenge.
After that, well.
Purportedly, the relationship disintegrated because Miro turned down more than one creative pitch. He was a guy raised on WWE who fulfilled his dream of going to WWE and appeared to treat AEW as the place he worked before going back to WWE. He seemed to hold Tony Khan in complete contempt for not positioning him as a main event-level talent.
In WWE, Rusev, at times, seemed more interested in getting himself over than doing business the right way - and just because it was funny doesn’t make it any less unprofessional. Ahead of a (dropped) Casket match against the Undertaker, Rusev infamously tweeted “Bury me softly brother”. He was trying to get over with the jaded “smark” fans with that line, and it worked - he was savvy enough to grasp the anti-WWE sentiment amongst those who bought his merch - but it was smug irony that was never going to get him over with the right people.
As irritating as it was to watch Rusev fail to break the glass ceiling, you can see, in retrospect, why it was lowered on him.
4. Goldberg
Goldberg, by his own admission, never actually liked the wrestling business. He never enjoyed the act of performing.
In large part because it was thrust upon him so quickly (and also because he was absolutely awesome), he felt entitled to stardom. He wasn’t so quick to share that fortune, either; he was infamously adverse to working with Chris Jericho in 1998, despite their feud drawing rave reviews before it was abandoned. He didn’t respect the key code of safety: beyond his much-publicised Starrcade ‘99 match against Bret Hart, Goldberg came close to internally decapitating both Meng and Jimmy Hart in a 15 second span. Goldberg was spoiled and reckless and barely even wanted it. He allegedly battered Evan Karagis when the latter admonished him for not shaking his hand.
The thing about respecting the business, though, is that business really isn’t worth respecting. Don’t tell the Undertaker that - he’d kick your ass - but it’s true. Goldberg knew what it was: an agonising circus with a brutal schedule for which the performers were drastically underpaid.
Perhaps he was right not to be a mark for it.
3. CM Punk
CM Punk treated AEW with utter contempt in a way he wouldn’t dream of doing with WWE.
A lot of this is conjecture, and nobody will ever know the full story, but here’s the case against him:
He might have very heavily implied to Tony Khan that he didn’t want Colt Cabana around. Virtually the entire AEW locker room at the time believes this to be the case. Certainly, the timing of Ace Steel arriving as a producer is a bit iffy. Punk claimed he didn’t care where Cabana worked - but he disappeared from the Dark Order rather swiftly when Punk began his programme with Hangman Page. Punk - and again, “allegedly” must be stated here - seemed to shoot his own angles on Collision, going into business for himself. Per Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful, there were no “immediate plans” for Punk to resume his 2022 feud with MJF a year later - despite Punk parading the ‘Real World title’ as MJF held the recognised top prize on Dynamite.
“Didn’t respect the business” is too strong . Punk willingly spends his days off in NXT to make it better, dodging so many invitations to join cults that he spends more time getting fit than the trainees.
Punk, however, certainly didn’t respect Tony Khan’s business. For that incendiary pre-prepared Brawl Out alone, Punk warrants inclusion here.
Part of this has to do with Tony Khan and his feckless inability to manage the situation, but still.
Crate of beer for the boys. Hell, have a chug yourself. Might calm that skinny fat ass down.
2. The Kliq
Those Kliq assholes thought they were so great.
They weren’t the Bone Street Krew. The ol’ BSK: we respected the business. We didn’t respect the business of spelling, but that’s because we weren’t no nerds. Who cares about correct spelling?
Probably Hunter, that bag-carrying geek. Oh, look at me, I’m a blue blood snob from Connecticut. What a lousy fake gimmick. He isn’t tough. He isn’t a damn pig farmer or a voodoo priest or whatever the damn f*ck Charles is this week.
The Kliq disrespected the business when they did that Curtain Call. They went out there and told the fans that the faces are friends with the heels and the whole game is rigged.
A “curtain call”, Jesus H. Christ.
What is this, a Shakespeare play?
This is more serious than that. Would that pansy Bill Shakespeare write something as hard as a zombie mortician floating up to heaven after the entire roster kicked his ass, only for him to come back to life after Leslie Nielsen investigated his disappearance?
I think not.
1. The Young Bucks
After a WWE tryout, the Young Bucks were loathed within veteran wrestling circles for allegedly refusing to shake the hand of Rob Van Dam - who in response said they looked like high schoolers - and for putting their hands on Booker T’s property.
They have since feigned ignorance, but in an inspired ploy, leaned into this bad rep as a marketing tactic. On a subsequent tour of Japan, they mimicked RVD and Booker’s signature taunts, and in general re-tooled their act as hyper-obnoxious renegades who, if they were accused of doing too many superkicks in a match, did one more - just to piss people off.
It was an ingenious move; the mainstream was in such a pathetic state at the time that the Bucks, in showing zero reverence to it whatsoever, were received as cool, exciting disruptors.
Burying the business for fun on Being The Elite, the Bucks were even received as savior figures to those who believed - and were then able to invest in - an alternative.
Those Cali asshole spot monkeys didn’t respect the damn business. Sure, they might have expanded it, allowed more boys to work, and they were detested, proving that you can actually get heat.
But they did some aerials and goddamn it, that won’t do.
Don’t jump off the top rope and make your opponent look like a fake geek for just standing there waiting. That ain’t the way we do it in the old school.
Well, the move is literally called Old School, but the point still remains, you little bitch!!!