10 Wrestlers Who Hated Parodies Of Their Work
CM Punk has pissed off far more people than Hangman Page...
The professional wrestler must have a skyscraper of an ego.
They are performance artists who award themselves the most absurdly arrogant nicknames: Best In The World, Showstopper, The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.
Paradoxically, the professional wrestler must also have incredibly thick skin, because conflict must arise for wrestling to work, and to arrive at conflict, their storyline rival must deliver a verbal horror challenge to convince the public that the hatred is real.
It's a fascinating process. Most normal folk don't even like chasing up a person in the trades when they're slow to do a job. Asking when it will get finished - or even started - is a very awkward interaction. Answering the phone to an unknown number is an interaction so potentially awkward that most people can't even bring themselves to do it.
Wrestlers meanwhile have to say something to the effect of "Here, is it OK if I say that I'm overjoyed that your beloved parent died recently? It's a bit harsh, and you're overwhelmed by grief, but the crowd will go "Ooh" for a few seconds".
It's wild that this sort of thing happens all of the time with little in the way of incident, but riffing on a catchphrase is verboten...
10. Hulk Hogan
Winning a trilogy didn't work for the Hulkster, brother.
That was the original plan across the summer of 2005: a trademark WWE trilogy booked between two top acts, Hulk Hogan and Shawn Michaels, designed to both block out a few months of programming and allow the lesser star one win to emerge from the programme with a degree of credit. This is something WWE has done for decades, and just to reiterate the planned, agreed-upon conclusion to the story: Hulk Hogan was going to win, decisively, 2-1, after a slight and obligatory bit of drama.
Hulk Hogan was going to win.
That didn't work for him, and so he used his pull to limit the programme to just the one match, and he also decreed that Shawn played heel, not babyface. God would not like if it if Shawn portrayed a villainous role on television - blowing several creatures great and small to smithereens, yes, but not playing a character - so Shawn had reservations. He went along with it, and in a sensational skit, parodied Hogan as a coffin-dodging egomaniac with an involuntary compulsion to say "brother" every other word. Hogan was said to have despised the bit, so to recap:
Hogan changes the trilogy he was going to win so that he could win more.
Asks Shawn to play heel.
Shawn plays heel, generates interest in match in heel role.
Hogan hates that too.
Perhaps Shawn should have simply laid down, since Hogan wasn't happy about anything.
Jeff Jarrett tried that, and Hogan sued.
F*cking hell.