10 Attempted WWE Repackages That Failed Miserably
1. Chavo Guerrero To Kerwin White
On a list littered with poorly conceived ideas, badly developed characters and proper old-school racism, Kerwin White stands tall over the competition.
Chavo Guerrero wasn’t doing much on his own. He’s from a celebrated wrestling lineage and is a fine performer in his own right, but his WWE popularity always hinged on his cousin Eddie, who remains a cult hero in the wrestling world. Chavo was struggling to get over after losing the Cruiserweight Championship in 2005, so WWE went down the familiar route of rebranding him.
They couldn’t have made a bigger hash of it if they tried. Chavo Guerrero, a hispanic gentleman, became Kerwin White, a stereotypically middle-class white conservative, who drove a golf card to the ring and adopted the catchphrase “if it’s not White, it’s not right”.
Let that one sink-in for a moment.
Who knows what was going on in creative’s heads when they came-up with this idea, particularly in 2005. This was the kind of pig-ignorant jingoism that should’ve died decades ago, but here was Kerwin White, appearing on your screens to make suggests remarks towards African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians on a near-weekly basis.
White was brutally offensive, and while eventually dropped after Eddie’s passing, his memory lives-on as a grim reminder of just how low WWE’s writers can go in search of cheap heat.