10 Wrestling Storylines Where Evil Won
In which the corporation always wins - to the misery of Booker T, Steve Austin, and Kofi Kingston...
Good should ultimately prevail in professional wrestling. It isn't some complex, thought-provoking meditation on the human condition.
Well, it is when Hangman Page is involved, because his arc is genuinely magnificent advanced storytelling that transcends the medium he is in the midst of pioneering. Elsewhere, it is an escapist fantasy designed to entertain the audience and allow a little light and vicarious triumph into their miserable lives. It exists, yes, to put smiles on people's faces. Quite how that is accomplished through Edge being really, really intense and every other match ending in a deflating disqualification is unclear - but that's what wrestling is meant to do.
The soap opera machinations of the form mean there are actually few happy endings, since it never ends. But the good guy should win when it's right for the good guy to win.
That's not to say that every babyface has to win every programme, obviously - the chase is all the more powerful when it is finally realised at the expense of a dominant, almost overbearing villain - but maybe the institutional racist avatar shouldn't have went over the black man he buried for being black that time...
10. Triple H Vs. Booker T
Is this the worst thing WWE ever did?
Forget the choo-choo noises, midcard champions losing more matches than Chris Hamrick, and the total destruction of tag team wrestling. These things were mere atrocities of fiction for which WWE has become infamous in recent years.
Here is your winner...and still World Heavyweight Champion...the White Supremacist! was a level of disgusting scarcely believable.
On his Something To Wrestle With podcast, Bruce Prichard is adamant that, when Triple H said "People like you don't get to be World Champion," he was referring to Booker T's status as a "WCW guy," which was funny. Booker T was already a five-time World Champion, and Triple H knew this because he was wearing the exact same physical belt at the time. And, if WCW guys didn't get to be World Champion, Terra Ryzing's reigns should have been disqualified. Triple H didn't exactly begin his career in PWG. Everybody he shook hands with to make himself look cool did, but he didn't.
He never said WCW guy Goldberg had "nappy hair". He never said WCW guy Sting should merely dance for his entertainment. The Undertaker didn't treat WCW guy Diamond Dallas Page like a bathroom attendant.
This was, unmistakably, a storyline in which the avatar of institutional racism defeated the black man, and took 23 whole seconds to make the cover in a spot you only ever f*cking do to protect the finisher when it's kicked out of. Hideous.
The only reason Prichard's claim was halfway believable is because...