10 Current WWE Superstars That Belong In Another Era
3. Finn Bálor - 1995 WWF
Bret Hart batted away The Kliq's tacit attempts to undermine him in 1995 by having excellent matches with the cavalcade of cartoon characters thrown at him as distractions away from Diesel and Shawn Michaels' upper card hijinks.
A pirate stole his jacket, a ninja and a king accused him of racism, an evil dentist looked to knock his teeth out and he spent WrestleMania fighting for the screams of a mad old psychopath, but he ended the year as WWE Champion thanks to a gritty reliance to both his opponents and the booking at large.
Finn Bálor shares some of Hart's superlative skill between the ropes, but precisely zero of the grit backstage. That's partly due to the ever-changing system he works in. Bálor lost his Royal Rumble Universal Title match with Brock Lesnar because Vince McMahon didn't deem him 'over' enough. The same Vince McMahon whose job it still is once a week to get him over.
Bret could still argue the toss in 1995 in stark opposition to the comparatively trapped 'Demon' in 2018. 'The Hitman' wasn't jobbing to an orthodontist just as Bálor shouldn't have been losing to an eerily familiar 'Big Red Machine'.