10 Horrible Decisions That Gave Us Great Wrestling

2. The Game Show Version Of NXT

If there€™s a more irritating way of introducing developmental wrestlers to the mainstream WWE audience than the game show version of NXT, I€™m really not sure I want to know what it is. How the WWE creative team could consider all the options, weigh them all up and then pick the one that most resembled the bloody Diva Search is beyond me. At any rate, the first season - incredibly, this thing ran for five seasons - ended with Wade Barrett being declared the winner, and given a WWE contract, to a rousing chorus of complete indifference. That was on June 1st, 2010. On June 7th, Barrett was interviewed backstage and asked how he felt on winning his WWE contract. He answered that they should ask him again next week, after he does something that€™s never been done before in the history of Monday Night RAW. The audience could have been forgiven for assuming that the big event he was talking about would be another anti-climax€ and then the main event of RAW rolled around, a match between CM Punk and John Cena that was shockingly interrupted by all of the NXT rookies, including Barrett. The rookies piled into both performers, attacking them mercilessly, attacking the referee, the ring announcer, the cameramen, the announcers. They began torturing Cena with repeated kicks and their finishers in the ring, while going about dismantling the ring itself and the ringside area. RAW went off the air with fans sitting there stunned, thinking something major and awesome had just transpired. They just weren€™t sure what. That was the introduction of the Nexus, at the beginning of June 2010. By the end of January 2011, Cena had succeeded in burying every single member of the group, including members who left during the angle, and new members who arrived to replace them. Still, that ending to RAW: that€™s an introduction to a heel faction and it couldn't have been envisaged at the beginning of NXT season one.
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Contributor

Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.