10 Part-Timers Who Screwed With The WWE Roster
3. The Fifteen Stone First-Footer
Plenty of people have made the argument that The Rock's appearance as half of the main event of both WrestleMania XXVIII and WrestleMania XXIX qualifies as screwing over the WWE roster.
After all, perhaps it should have been a full time wrestler who worked the main event. Perhaps the WWE Champion heading into WrestleMania XXIX should have been someone who actually worked for the company. Perhaps the rub of ending CM Punk's glorious 434 days as WWE Champion should have fallen to someone who'd still be there on Monday evening. Perhaps the forty minutes or so spent on the WWE Championship bout at WrestleMania XXIX and the near sixty minutes spent on musical guests, entrances and introductions at WrestleMania XXVIII would have been better spent promoting a potential future megastar.
We're not going to make those kind of arguments - although, to a degree, most of them have a sliver of merit. No, today we're looking at a slam dunk: The Rock's involvement as guest host for WrestleMania XXVII. Aside from introducing the show, getting a pop and a little mainstream media attention, 'The Great One' didn't have a lot to do at WrestleMania as the guest host. That is, until the main event: the WWE Champion The Miz, versus the challenger John Cena.
The Miz had been booked to be competitive against Cena at WrestleMania for a portion of the match. To admit to how mismatched the bout was would have turned the crowd in attendance off it entirely, and they were already feeling iffy about it. The two men brawled outside the ring in the crowd, and accidentally knocked each other out, resulting in a double count out finish... and then The Rock appeared, bellowing that the match shouldn't end like that, and restarting it (because that's a thing guest hosts can do) with no disqualification, no count-outs and no time limit.
As The Miz and Cena recovered and re-entered the ring, Rock flattened Cena with a Rock Bottom, and his opponent heelishly took advantage to cover and pin the challenger and retain the title. The Rock then took exception to The Miz celebrating his unlikely win at The Granddaddy Of Them All (Copyright Dusty Rhodes & The NWA, 1983), and executed a crowd-pleasing spinebuster/People's Elbow combo on the upstart. The Miz looked great working with The Rock for this brief moment, considering that he'd suffered a very real concussion in the double count-out spot, and couldn't remember a thing about the finish of the match afterwards.
As the show closed and the pay-per-view faded out, Cena and The Miz were nowhere to be seen: it was The Rock, a man who hadn't wrestled in seven years, who posed for the crowd on the turnbuckles. The WrestleMania XXVII main event and the WWE Championship had been eclipsed to put over a celebrity guest, and to set up the main event of the following year's show.