10 Wrestling Nightmares That Almost Came True
Steve Austin almost WASN'T the face of the WWE Attitude Era...
What's your wrestling nightmare?
Imagine a wretched place in which your investment is futile. A wrestler wins, but it means nothing; trapped in some looping hell world, they must be Sisyphus, only instead of rolling a rock up a hill, they are tasked with carrying the Miz to something presentable (despite cleanly defeating him the week prior). You watch very talented wrestlers who are gifted at telling their own story with a microphone, but a writer exists to do this for them. Newly recruited trainers are indoctrinated into what they are told is a "family", but are fired at the most inopportune time imaginable. Several wrestlers must laugh like a parody of a supervillain because that's what their employer thinks passes for high art.
Wrestlers are called worse than sh*t for not working matches for which they were advertised, and a tournament is announced to determine the next champions for the belts they vacated. No such tournament takes place. The hypocrisy is maddening. All of these complaints are ultimately extremely frivolous when you consider the horrific old boy's club culture at the rotting heart of the company.
Hold on. This is real life. Never mind.
These potential nightmares almost did come true...
10. Becky Lynch Almost Retired For Good
Becky Lynch's rise to the pinnacle of pro wrestling under the guise of 'The Man' didn't feel revelatory to the ultra-hardcores who followed the early phase of her career.
She was always a very witty and charismatic performer. She was an in-ring prodigy too. She was entirely ahead of her time, which is usually a good thing, but Becky pioneered an act that had no place in the mainstream at said time. It's not as if she was on the cusp of something, either. It took more than half a decade for western women's wrestling to catch up.
Watch her operate as pre-WWE Rebecca Knox here. Her ability to read and then immediately own the room is outstanding. There's genuinely a Rock-esque balance between charm and obnoxiousness in that promo, an irresistible love-to-hate blend.
She suffered a serious head injury in 2006 and all but retired from wrestling. While she made three cameo returns during a seven-year hiatus, she resisted the lure of returning full-time because the business remained in a woeful, misogynistic state. If the American indie scene didn't make steady, patient strides that hinted at actual, transformative change, wrestling fans may have been deprived of one of WWE's better characters in the modern era.
Hers is a very inspirational story that WWE can't actually market: "Becky rose above the adversity - that was entirely our doing! - to one day make it".