10 Awful WWE Ruthless Aggression Gimmicks That Didn't Get Over

To be fair to Kevin Fertig, the Mordecai gimmick wasn’t actually that terrible on paper. It wasn’t even that bad in execution. The religious zealot on a crusade to rid the world of sin had been tried and tested many times in wrestling, but the all-white aesthetic and Fertig’s undeniable presence made this something of an open goal for WWE in 2005. A big-time feud with The Undertaker was all but inevitable.

A number of factors convened to ensure that the open goal was missed. For one, Fertig wasn’t particularly good in the ring. He wasn’t as terrible as history seems to believe he was, but his lack of confidence was glaringly obvious as soon as he made it to TV. His real problems came with the microphone, and Fertig just wasn’t able to convey the foreboding intensity that the gimmick demanded.

A supposed attitude backstage didn’t help matters, but Mordecai was arguably a victim of the era in which he found himself. Fans no longer had any interest in characters being established solely to eventually lose to The Undertaker. The audience was also losing interest in wooden big guys, and Mordecai’s lack of intangible aptitude worked against him.

In many ways, Mordecai failed because the Ruthless Aggression era suffered from a true identity crisis. It wasn’t the Attitude Era, it wasn’t the modern era of reality over character. It was gimmicky, but gimmicky at a time when fans had seen the extreme ends of the spectrum and were no longer interested in cartoons. If he had arrived in 1998, the story of Mordecai could have been different. As it is, he stands tall as the Ruthless Aggression era’s biggest failed gimmick.