10 Major Mistakes WWE Has Made In 2016 (So Far)
3. It’s Clubbering Time
In January 2016, reports began to surface that Shinsuke Nakamura, AJ Styles, ‘Machine Gun’ Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows of New Japan Pro Wrestling had been headhunted by WWE: made an offer they couldn't refuse.
It was a good old-fashioned talent raid, and the sheer chutzpah of it captured the imaginations of the WWE faithful. Unique talents Styles and Nakamura, of course, were the stars people were most excited to see perform in a WWE ring, but there was something that Anderson and Gallows had going for them which trumped their immediate skills as wrestlers: their core membership of New Japan’s world famous faction Bullet Club.
Bullet Club founder Prince Devitt already worked for the WWE in their developmental brand NXT under the name Finn Bálor. WWE had already sparked cagey rumours of a possible version of the stable in NXT by marketing Bálor Club t-shirts in a similar style to the iconic Bullet Club t-shirts that had become such a global bestseller.
Styles had replaced Devitt as leader of the faction in NJPW: his arrival in WWE with a formative tag team from that faction seemed certain to spell out a reformation under the WWE umbrella. But when Styles turned up at the Royal Rumble to a massive ovation from the crowd, he was alone.
Four weeks later, Nakamura was announced as NXT’s newest signee... but we would have to wait until April 11th for the RAW debut of Anderson and Gallows, three months after the rumours first started flying around. In that debut, they blindsided the Usos, the WWE’s most generic and pointless tag team.
If their belated debut hadn’t sucked the excitement from their New Japan fans, then their treatment since then has certainly done the trick. For three months, Gallows and Anderson have played the role of thuggish, fairly useless supporting cast to whatever feud Styles is in at any given time.
It’s telling that Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows have been stripped down to to just their characters’ given names, no emphasis given to the ‘Machine Gun’ nickname or the ‘Doc’ title (it originally stood for ‘Director Of Chaos’). That would make the pair of them seem harder and cooler than WWE seem to want them to be, and it seems that WWE want them to be gormless thugs.
The name of the faction doesn’t help: WWE can’t call them ‘Bullet Club’ as NJPW own the trademark, but ‘The Club’ is legitimately the most anaemic name for a supposedly menacing stable of bruisers that I’ve ever heard. It makes them sound like they meet in a treehouse dressed as cowboys and indians and refuse to let girls play with them.